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Justin Harlan:
Hi, I'm Justin Harlan, Managing Director for Tulsa Remote, and we are here with a special episode of Remote With, where we are talking with remote work leaders from across the country who are in town for Plugged In, which is an amazing two-day remote work summit that we have coming up this week. And it has given us the opportunity to talk to amazing folks like Sacha Connor, who's with me today. Thanks so much for being with us.

Sacha Connor:
Well, thanks for inviting me to Tulsa.

Justin Harlan:
Of course. I'm glad you're getting to see the city for the first time and look forward to showing you around this afternoon. But in the meantime, I am eager to dive into all of the knowledge that you have about remote work and hybrid work and distributed teams. Let's start with just kind of laying the foundation of who you are and kind of what has gotten you to this point. We'll dig in a little bit as to like when you fell in love with remote work or started caring about this. But tell us a little bit about Sacha. Like who is Sacha Connor? And what do you want folks to know about you and your background?

Sacha Connor:
So I am currently the CEO of Virtual Work Insider, which is a company that I started about six years ago to teach teams the skills to lead and collaborate and communicate across distance. But prior to that, I was actually a marketer by trade. So I worked in ad agencies first, and then I worked for 14 years at the Clorox Company, which is a $7 billion company that's headquartered in Oakland, California. So it sells a lot of those products that many of you probably have in your kitchens, in your households. And I led new product innovation teams, sales teams, and marketing teams for the Clorox company.

Justin Harlan:
Talk a little bit about like, when was it that you realized that remote work was something that you were going to care a lot about or wanted to think more about? I don't know, like, do you have a specific moment that you as an employee or just human being, became fascinated with remote work as a whole?

Sacha Connor:
So I hadn't thought about it much until I was working at headquarters for Clorox in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. And I'd been there about six years, and my husband and I had our first child. Her name was Nevin. And Nevin was born when we were living in San Francisco, but we wanted to move back to Philadelphia to have her grow up near her extended family. I really loved my job at Clorox, and I wanted to stay with Clorox. But it was 2010. And at that time, a lot of jobs weren't remote. And so I started to plant some seeds around, you know, could I keep my job, but do it from the opposite coast of the United States. And I had a good relationship with the chief marketing officer. And he said, okay, you can be an experiment for us. Let's see if you can lead your teams and build your your business that you're working on from 3000 miles and three time zones away.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah. And what was that like? I mean, how did that go? Because that I mean, at the time, just to kind of paint the picture, that was a pretty rare thing for big companies like Clorox to allow, right?

Sacha Connor:
Exactly. So I felt a huge weight on my shoulders to be able to do this well. And I went from, you know, one day working, you know, in the office with the majority of my teams to the next day working from the opposite coast of the United States and trying to figure out how to do it. It was a really, really steep learning curve, which was partially why I decided to start Virtual Work Insider years later, eight years later. So I spent eight years of leading these geographically distributed and hybrid teams while I was remote and realized that there was such a need to help people up that learning curve.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah. And I've heard and read you use kind of this phrase about distance bias during your time at Clorox. And curious, could you share a little bit about what that is and how you've experienced it and then how that helped to inform your work at Virtual Work Insider?

Sacha Connor:
So what I didn't mention earlier, when they said, yes, you can move to Philadelphia, it came with some caveats. And the caveats were, you'll never get promoted, because to be director level or above, you have to be here at headquarters. The second caveat was, you'll never get to work in certain roles or on certain businesses, because those roles and businesses are so important that you have to be here at headquarters.

Sacha Connor:
And you are going to move from a high potential employee to low potential, not because your skills have changed. But what it really uncovered was that there was distance bias that was baked into the people processes. And I didn't even have the word for that at the time. It wasn't until years later. I was still at Clorox. It was one of my last roles there. And they had hired in the Neuroleadership Institute to talk about unconscious bias. And they shared their SEEDS, S-E-E-D-S, SEEDS, unconscious bias model. And the D in SEEDS is distance bias, which other people call it proximity bias, which means our brain's natural tendency to put more value on the people and things that are closer to us than those that are farther away. And so when I had that word finally, I was like, oh, you know, that's what I've been feeling all of these years. That's what I was feeling, you know, when originally they said, you know, that I was going to have all these caveats with moving. And then that's what I was feeling when I was being left out constantly for meetings and project work because I was kind of out of sight, out of mind. And so I started to think about, you know, how do we put plans in place to mitigate that bias? And at eight years of doing work virtually at Clorox, I was able to get them to change hearts and minds. And so I was promoted to a director level. I did get to work on those businesses that they said that I couldn't. I got them to delink location from promotability and potential.

Justin Harlan:
So the weight that you were feeling ultimately kind of paid off for many others down the road it sounds like. What was it about working at Clorox that made you comfortable sacrificing all of those things in the caveats that you were given to be able to move and continue working there? Because that must have been such an incredible place to work in order to give all that up. I'm just curious, like what was it about that culture or work environment that made you want to hang on to it despite not being able to move up or work in certain departments and all of the things that you just mentioned?

Sacha Connor:
So I worked in brand marketing, which is the heart of the company. And so I just, I felt like I was surrounded by such smart people. I was learning so much on the job and through training. They have a rotational program. So I was able to rotate between different brands, different roles, like I said, new product innovation, sales, marketing. And so I just loved everything I was working on. And the people were great. I mean, the people cared about you with those caveats, right? I just I heard the caveats. And in my brain, I said, OK, just get me back to Philadelphia and I'll show you. You know, I just I knew that I was going to fight my way through this and I was going to show them that they were wrong. I had no idea how I was going to do that, but I just kind of took it as a challenge to figure it out.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah. You seem like you have that same competitive fire that I do. Like the best way you can motivate me is telling me I can't do it.

Sacha Connor:
I probably wouldn't be sitting here in front of you today had they not done that, like thrown down that gauntlet.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah.

Sacha Connor:
And I'd say, you know, okay, I'll figure it out.

Justin Harlan:
Well, and you, I mean, you were then forced to basically have to learn all of these things that you've now developed through Virtual Work Insider and all of that for other people to learn some of the same, I'm sure, challenges and beauties in remote work. And I'm curious to dig in a little there. What are the biggest challenges that you think companies face today as it relates to like hybrid and remote work? What are some of the biggest hurdles that they have to overcome?

Sacha Connor:
Well, we know that flexibility is really important. So location flexibility, time flexibility. And for me, that location flexibility was amazing because I was able to have my kids grow up near their extended family. And we see research now saying that people want time flexibility even more than location flexibility. But with those two types of flexibility comes a lot of complexity. And so what I'm seeing when I'm working with teams and organizations is they need help with coordinating within that complexity. So across time zones, across different locations, across different hybrid schedules. And people aren't prepared with like, what are the techniques in order to create that coordination?

Justin Harlan:
Yeah. And so where do you start? Like if you wanted to, so we know that's a challenge. I think we've been aware that that is hard. Where do you start as a leader building an organization to try to overcome that for your employees?

Sacha Connor:
Every organization is a little different. So you probably hear in the terms that are thrown out there, there's different organizations that are hybrid flexible, hybrid structured, remote first, virtual first, cloud HQ. And then some organizations that are coming out and saying, you know, I want everybody back in a office five days a week. And so where I come in and help an organization is meeting them where they are in terms of what does distance look like for them within their organization? So each organization is a little different. And then within each team, each team is structured a little bit differently as well. And so one of the foundational exercises that I'll do with a team is we'll map out the geographic anatomy of that team to show where people are located across time zones, what different hybrid schedules people are on, and then talk about, well, what are the insights there that would help us become more location-inclusive, would help us overcome and mitigate some of that distance bias? Because you would be surprised when I'm working with teams that some people don't even know where each other are located, and it causes a lot of behaviors that create tension and friction.

Justin Harlan:
What other recommendations do you give around tools or structures or systems for distributed teams specifically that are all across the country or world and trying to do similar work throughout the day?

Sacha Connor:
So what we're seeing more and more of is that some research is coming out backing the use of team charters or team working agreements where we're getting really clear on expectations and we're talking about our goals and our roles and how we're going to work together. So we've seen... BCG came out with some research that was showing that creating those agreements at that team level instead of top-down mandates or just at that individual level, at the team level is really important to creating joy within the team and also team effectiveness. And then we also saw with some McKinsey data that teams that figure out how they're going to work, when they're going to work, where they're going to work, that really contributes to organizational health. So what I often do with teams is help them with understanding what a team working agreement or team charter is, what the sections are that the team needs to agree on, help facilitate those discussions and those agreements, and then help them actually put them into action.

Justin Harlan:
Got it. So being clear up front, which I think is certainly a best practice in remote work or distributed work of like building out that clarity in terms of expectations and how you do want to function and then figuring out systems that actually bring your desires to life in real time.

Sacha Connor:
You have to get beyond just even the conceptual piece of it. It's down into like what you said, the systems that we have to break down. So when I first started working with teams and they'd invite me to come in, sometimes the pain point that they'd ask me to solve is, oh, we have too many meetings. Can you help us have better meetings, less meetings? And the meetings are just a symptom of a broader problem. So usually I'll come in and I'll do an assessment and I'll realize that wait, we need to like, back way up here and talk about, you know, what are our goals and our roles? Like, are we clear on that first? And then talk about how we're going to create some connection between the team, because the teams often are very transactional when they often many of these team members haven't ever met each other in person, especially if they were hiring people during the pandemic, travel budgets get cut, and then people haven't met each other in person. So they're transacting instead of connecting. And so it's become kind of a tense environment sometimes. And so starting with our purpose and our people and then moving into, okay, what are our systems? What are our ways of working? How can we reduce meeting time through using asynchronous communication dashboards, get information in other ways, and then use our meeting time for things that really require us to debate, discuss, decide.

Justin Harlan:
What is the biggest issue that you see across companies right now as it relates to meetings? What are the pitfalls that we fall into, especially around meeting design?

Sacha Connor:
One is I think people default to the meetings because it's super simple just to send an invite.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah.

Sacha Connor:
And it's like, okay, well, I know I have this thing that we need to talk about. I'm just going to send the invite and then I'm going to deal with it once we're in the meeting together.

Justin Harlan:
It's like delaying the next step.

Sacha Connor:
Yeah. And then they're using the meetings often to get updates. They're using it as an accountability checkpoint because if I have asked you to come to this meeting, you're going to have to tell me what you're working on, how's it going, because I've gotten radio silence from you in other communication channels. And usually in those meetings that maybe you would have... A subject line about a topic that you're going to talk about. But there's no other agenda. There's no other information about what it is that we're there to achieve. And also, there are way too many people invited. So it's like meeting overwhelm in terms of too many meetings and then too many people in each of the meetings to be effective. So we're wasting people's time. And lastly, the other thing I see is in the hybrid meeting situation where those, you know, that Clorox being a fully remote employee, a remote work pioneer there where there were not that many others, and being the only one not in the room. I know that those hybrid meetings, that distance bias is felt even in those meetings. And so helping them to not only figure out, do we need a meeting or not? How do we set a better agenda where people know what value that they need to bring to the meeting and the framework that we're going to use to discuss in the meeting? But how do we make it engaging and inclusive for everybody so everybody's voice is heard even if they are not in the physical room?

Justin Harlan:
There was also, at least what I find within hybrid setting, is there's like the natural meeting that then happens after the meeting is over where you're like, okay, thanks for joining us on Zoom, Sacha. And then you hit the end and then it's like the people that are still in the room actually continue talking.

Sacha Connor:
Right.

Justin Harlan:
And then you've like now missed out on that content or opportunity to contribute because, again, based on that proximity or distance bias, there's other people that are physically sitting there. What's the replacement action that you would encourage people to take instead of the meeting in those moments where you're like, I can't deal with this right now... But I also have a desire to like check it off my box. What could you do instead if you're leaning into kind of like the flexible, asynchronous nature of remote work that we love?

Sacha Connor:
Well, back to what you're saying about systems. So thinking about what are the types of information that needs to flow amongst the team and where are we going to put that information? In which communication tool are we going to use and how fast is a response expected? So when I come to talk to teams, I'll have them list out like all the different communication tools that they're using. And often what you'll see, especially in cross-functional teams, is that there's multiple communication tools that they're using for the same types of things. So they might be using a SharePoint and a OneDrive and a Box folder for collaborative documents, and they don't know where to find things. And then they might also have Microsoft Teams channels and Slack. And so it's like, where is the conversation happening? And so if we if we slow down to to talk about those things and say, OK, in this team, all of our collaborative documents are going to be housed in box. That's where you can find things. OK, then I might be able to self-serve that information now that I know where to look for it instead of calling the meeting. Then there's other techniques. So one of the techniques that I used at Clorox was that we knew that we were going to need synchronous collaboration time throughout the week. We knew that there's always fire drills that pop up. There's things that we need to problem solve together. There's ideation that needs to happen. And so we set aside what I used to call spark time, which was two times a week we would we would hold time on everybody's calendar for spark time.

Sacha Connor:
And if you didn't need it, you didn't have to use it. But we knew that we were all available during those times because the hardest part is to be like, oh, well, your schedule is booked here and my schedule is booked. And we're wasting all of this time trying to coordinate with each other. But we knew during those two hours on a Tuesday and two hours on a Thursday, we could grab each other and come into a virtual room and problem solve or ideate.

Justin Harlan:
And that's you and your direct reports or leadership team members or who were you holding that time with?

Sacha Connor:
So I was a studio leader at Clorox as my last role, which was a cross-functional role. So I had sales team members, market research, brand marketing, R&D, sales people. So very cross-functional team. So we were holding it across the cross-functional team because those were the team members that usually needed to come together to solve a business problem.

Justin Harlan:
So what predictions would you make about where we're headed over the next five to 10 years within our workforce? I mean, roles of technology, evolution of remote work, are people going to continue to kind of stay within this hybrid space? I know none of us like to make predictions because we don't want to see it on social media 10 years from now, but give us your best. What do you have? Where do you think we're heading together?

Sacha Connor:
I guess the best I can give you is that I think that work's going to continue to become more distributed, more flexible. I think technology is going to continue to evolve to enable it. If I think back to 2010 when I went remote... Video conferencing was just starting. And we've come so far, you know, I'm thinking back to when I went remote, I had a laptop that couldn't even really handle the video conferencing, where I'd be in the Cisco video conferencing, and I hear it whirling, and then all of a sudden, just like, shut off. And then even when I started Virtual Work Insider six years ago, I used to have to teach people how to turn on their video cameras before we could even have a virtual training session. And now the pandemic's obviously kind of pushed those behaviors so much faster. But I think into the future, because we're going to continue to be more distributed, more flexible, I think that everybody's going to need to learn what I call omnimodal leadership skills, meaning being able to be effective at leading and communicating and collaborating and creating connection, whether you're in an in-person setting, whether you're in a fully remote setting or in some sort of hybrid setting. Because even teams I'm working with right now, those team members are having to flow between those modes even within a given day. And it's a really high expectation for people to be able to know how to do that on their own. And so this upskilling is necessary, especially as we're moving into a more distributed future.

Justin Harlan:
We've talked a lot about employers. I'd love to just maybe have you speak a little bit to employees? And along those lines, what are the things that remote first or hybrid employees right now can do to help navigate the current work environment, advocate for their own professional development and growth? What recommendations would you give, especially for those folks that have recently come out of college and are getting thrown into this kind of workforce that they may not feel prepared for within a remote job or hybrid job? What advice do you give to folks that are trying to really put their best foot forward in the workplace in today's environment.

Sacha Connor:
I learned early on one of the most important things for me to do, but the hardest thing to do was to stay visible. Because it's really hard to stay visible when you're virtual. Back to that distance bias we were talking about. So there's also recency bias, which is our brain's natural tendency to put more importance on the people and things that we've heard from or seen most recently as well. So being aware of that distance bias and that recency bias, when I realized that it became kind of a daily intentional practice for me to make the people who were co-located together, who are mainly my key stakeholders, my senior leaders, executives of the organization, and my peer set, to make them feel as if I was in the building with them every day, right? To hack that recency bias, to hack that distance bias. And so it's actually why I'm giving the workshop later this week around staying visible while virtual, because I learned through these intentional practices that the tactics and techniques needed to stay top of mind and to overcome those biases.

Justin Harlan:
Well, I don't want to give away your entire session, but maybe give one recommendation that will tease the listeners a bit. What were some of the things that you did or one thing that you did to stay visible even though you were working virtually?

Sacha Connor:
Yeah, I'll give you a funny example that I did. When I first went remote, I printed out a picture of myself with my phone number on it. It said, call me. And I had everybody in the office posted up in their office or their cubicle so that it was a visual trigger or reminder that I existed. People listening are probably going to be like, I would never do that. And that's okay. But you think about, you know, I teach it as the technique of a physical leave behind. You know, something is in the space of the other people that you're trying to stay top of mind with that will help them remember like, oh, yeah, Sacha, I need to tell her the thing we just talked about in the hallway. So how do you, again, stay top of mind in that physical space and move it beyond just the virtual piece?

Justin Harlan:
And did you know at that time when you moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia that the proximity bias would exist? Like, were you being proactive in that action? Or like, did you anticipate that people would forget about you because you weren't physically there? I don't know. It's like, because it was so new. It was so new. There weren't people that were really doing that. And so I'm just curious, did you just have the wherewithal to be like, this is gonna be hard? Or what led you?

Sacha Connor:
A really good question. I'm like, why did I do that? I mean, I think I must have been instinctually been worried about that. But it was so new and I was it was such a big experiment. I didn't even know what I was getting myself into.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah.

Sacha Connor:
What I did learn, though, is that having been incorporated into a team on a on a Friday, the team that I've been worked with for for months and months and months on a Friday left and having moved and then started working with them from a different location on a Monday. It wasn't as big of a transition as when I came back from maternity leave my second time. I was fully remote still then and was with a brand new team that I had not built any trust or connection with.

Justin Harlan:
They didn't have the call me posters?

Sacha Connor:
They didn't have the call me posters. They didn't have any experience with me in person at all to kind of halo into the kickstarting of that relationship. And then I learned a ton more about what it meant to work in a remote environment because I had to build those connections across distance. Whereas the other one, I had had those relationships already built before I moved and they were strong enough to last. If you're newly remote to a brand new group or a brand new organization, it's a different level of hurdles that you have to build those connections.

Justin Harlan:
And at the heart of what you're describing is trust, where you had the working trust with the folks when you first left that obviously makes that a bit easier. And then when you're starting fresh, you're also having to establish trust from a distance, which there's probably an entire conversation we could dig into around that. But I feel like trust plays such a huge role in remote work, whether it's manager to direct report or peer to peer or direct report to manager. If you don't have trust, especially when you're not together, it just makes it a lot harder to navigate. And it sounds like you experienced some of that too. What's your hot take on remote work? If you were to just boldly call something out that folks have gotten wrong or that you feel like is being misrepresented as it relates to remote workers? What is your remote work hot take?

Sacha Connor:
Well, I love working with both the executive teams and the more senior leaders. And then I love working at that team level, especially with more junior cross-functional teams where the actual work's getting done and helping to bridge the gap between the two. Because my hot take is that I think those senior leaders take for granted that their teams actually know how to operate in these distributed environments. Oh, we've got this. We've figured this out. They've been working remotely since the pandemic, they know how to work through this. And I'll tell you, when I'm working at that team level and getting my hands dirty by observing meetings and getting added to Microsoft Teams to watch asynchronous communication, when I survey these teams, they don't have it figured out just yet. And they need that support. They need the role modeling from the senior leaders, and then they need some upskilling and support at that team level.

Justin Harlan:
Yeah, which in this case, back to my point about trust, sounds like maybe there's too much trust. How do you ensure you're giving folks the skills and coaching to then be able to trust and empower and move them forward. Where can folks find you if they want to continue learning about you and your work?

Sacha Connor:
Sure. So you can find me on LinkedIn, that's where I put out the majority of our content. And then our website is virtualworkinsider.com.

Justin Harlan:
We're so excited to have you in town, Sacha, for our Tulsa Plugged In conference. If folks that are listening want to check out the content that we develop over the next couple of days, please visit us at TulsaPluggedIn.com or go follow us on social media at Tulsa Remote on just about every platform. Sacha, we're so grateful for you for giving us your time today. Thank you.

Sacha Connor:
Thanks, Justin.